The Dunning-Kruger effect describes people’s overestimate of their own expertise and unawareness of their incompetence in grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm safety, debating, and financial acumen.

Cornell’s Stav Atir and  Emily Rosenzweig of Tulane asked volunteers if they were familiar with concepts like centripetal force and photon as well as fictitious terms including plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine.

About 90% of participants claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fake concepts, and people who thought they were most knowledgeable also said they recognized more of the meaningless terms.

Atir and Rosenzweig concluded that low performers lack insight about their skill deficits because they ”don’t know what they don’t know.”

Another study, by University of California San Diego’s Elanor Williams, Justin Kruger of NYU, and Cornell’s David Dunning asked volunteers to complete a logical reasoning task, an intuitive physics problem, and a financial acumen challenge.

Some participants achieved perfect scores and expressed confidence in their answers, yet those who achieved no correct answers expressed the same degree of confidence as the most able performers.

Both high and low achievers made judgments based on intuitive “rules,” and said they felt confident because they had a clear rationale.
Williams’ team concluded, “Rule-based confidence is no guarantee of self-insight into performance.”

Similarly, people who filed for bankruptcy said they had high confidence in their financial acumen, though their financial management skills didn’t keep them solvent.

More than 25,000 people rated their financial knowledge and completed the 2012 National Financial Capability Study, conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority with the U.S. Treasury.
Of these, 800 respondents said they filed bankruptcy within the previous two years.

Bankruptcy filers achieved financial knowledge scores in the lowest third of respondents, but they rated their knowledge more positively than financially-solvent respondents.
Nearly a quarter of the recently bankrupted respondents gave themselves the highest possible rating, whereas only 13 percent of other respondents were equally confident.

Even 80 professionally-credentialed physical scientists at top universities provided a number of inaccurate purpose-based (“teleological”) explanations about “why things happen” in the natural world.

When these professional scientists provided explanations under time constraints, they were twice as likely to endorse inaccurate rationales, reported Boston University’s Deborah Kelemen, Joshua Rottman, and Rebecca Seston.

Scientists were equally likely as humanities scholars to endorse inaccurate arguments despite most physical scientists’ rejection of purpose-based explanations for natural phenomena.

These results suggest that most people hold pseudo-scientific explanations as “a default explanatory preference,” and could explain the attraction of myth and religion across cultures.

Most people hold a positive view of their capabilities even when faced with contrary evidence.
However, women may hold an unrealistically modest view of their capabilities despite affirming feedback.
These biases in self assessment suggest the importance of realistic recalibration of confidence, aligned with consensual feedback.

-*How do you minimize the risks of “Clueless Confidence”?

-*How can systematic underestimates of competence be reduced to increase “Realistic Confidence”?

Related Posts:

Useful Fiction: Optimism Bias of Positive Illusions

Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Self-Delusions of Skill: Pointy-Haired Boss Effect

©Kathryn Welds